>> I am still +1 on some how getting away from short_open_tag support, if
>> nothing else, to encourage better coding practices (just as we did
>> with turning register_globals off by default).
>
> I fail to see how using <?php is "better coding practices". Unless you
> plan on distributing your code to the masses or mixing XML/XHTML without
> trivially escaping it, I see absolutely no point in using <?php over <?.
The web is a rapidly changing market and standards are being activley
evolved. <?php is more compatable with standards on the web than <? ...
and its not about XML document headers.
> In reality, very few people intermix PHP and XML. It just doesn't make
> a whole lot of sense to do so. People tend to keep the two separate and
> parse the XML from PHP.
I have written semi static XML document from php before (for speed reasons
over using an output parser). EG:
<?xml ... ?>
<root>
<data>
<age><?php echo $age; ?></age>
</data>
</root>
> In the XHTML case, a lot of people mistakenly believe that they must
> start their documents with an <?xml encoding=...?> tag, which if you
> read the XHTML spec, is actually not necessary. The only use for the XML
> encoding tag is for XML parsers to get the right character encoding.
> Browsers, which are typically the target of PHP generated pages, get
> their character encoding from the Content-type header, or optionally
> from a similar meta tag. But even if you choose to put in the XML
> encoding tag, I find it a hell of a lot easier to just put <?echo '<?xml
> encoding="foobar"?>'?> at the top instead of changing hundreds of <?
> tags to <?php
The other advantage is to force people one way or the other. In the case
of 50% of servers allowing short tags, and the other not... a script using
short tags will only work on 50% of PHP installations (just as a script
that relies on register_globals will only work on servers with it switched
on).
The only way around that problem is:
1. to force short tags on everywhere
2. to force people to use a tagging which is available everywhere
> PHP became popular because it eliminated most of the tediousness of
> writing CGI scripts or low-level Apache modules. If we slowly but
> surely eliminate all the convenience aspects of PHP we are going to turn
> the experience back into one of tedium again.
Then surely short tags should be forced on in all cases if its a core
offering of the php scripting language?
> PHP is not a pure language. It never will be. The problem it solves is
> ugly. Ugly problems often require ugly solutions. Solving an ugly
> problem in a pure manner is bloody hard. PHP's aim is to make solving
> the web problem easy. Ergo, therefore, Q.E.D, removing all the "ugly"
> features of PHP is going to make it harder and harder to use PHP to
> solve the web problem.
>
> -Rasmus
--
Dan Hardiker [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
ADAM Software & Systems Engineer
First Creative
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